• DvcsComparison

Terminology

Agreeing on a common terminology is surprisingly difficult, primarily because each VCS uses these terms when describing subtly different tasks, objects, and concepts. Where possible, we try to provide a generic definition of the concepts, but you should consult the individual system's glossaries for details. Here are some basic references for terminology, from some of the standard web-based references on each VCS. You can also refer to glossaries for each DVCS:

• Subversion: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn.basic.html

• Bazaar: http://bazaar-vcs.org/BzrGlossary

• Mercurial: http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/UnderstandingMercurial

• git: http://book.git-scm.com/1_the_git_object_model.html

branch

• A line of development; a collection of revisions, ordered by time.

checkout/working copy/working tree

• A tree of code the developer can edit, linked to a branch.

index

• A "staging area" where a revision is built (unique to git).

repository

• A collection of revisions, organized into branches.

clone

• A complete copy of a branch or repository.

commit

• To record a revision in a repository.

merge

• Applying all the changes and history from one branch/repository to another.

pull

• To update a checkout/clone from the original branch/repository, which can be remote or local

push/publish

• To copy a revision, and all revisions it depends on, from a one repository to another.

cherry-pick

• To merge one or more specific revisions from one branch to another, possibly in a different repository, possibly without its dependent revisions.

rebase

• To "detach" a branch, and move it to a new branch point; move commits to the beginning of a branch instead of where they happened in time.

Typical Workflow

At the moment, the typical workflow for a Python core developer is:

• Edit code in a checkout until it is stable enough to commit/push.
• Commit to the master repository.

It is a rather simple workflow, but it has drawbacks. For one, because any work that involves the repository takes time thanks to the network, commits/pushes tend to not necessarily be as atomic as possible. There is also the drawback of there not being a necessarily cheap way to create new checkouts beyond a recursive copy of the checkout directory.

A DVCS would lead to a workflow more like this:

• Branch off of a local clone of the master repository.
• Edit code, committing in atomic pieces.
• Merge the branch into the mainline, and
• Push all commits to the master repository.

While there are more possible steps, the workflow is much more independent of the master repository than is currently possible. By being able to commit locally at the speed of your disk, a core developer is able to do atomic commits much more frequently, minimizing having commits that do multiple things to the code. Also by using a branch, the changes are isolated (if desired) from other changes being made by other developers. Because branches are cheap, it is easy to create and maintain many smaller branches that address one specific issue, e.g. one bug or one new feature. More sophisticated features of DVCSs allow the developer to more easily track long running development branches as the official mainline progresses.

Contenders

This PEP does not consider darcs, arch, or monotone. The main problem with these DVCSs is that they are simply not popular enough to bother supporting when they do not provide some very compelling features that the other DVCSs provide. Arch and darcs also have significant performance problems which seem unlikely to be addressed in the near future.

Interoperability

For those who have already decided which DVCSs they want to use, and are willing to maintain local mirrors themselves, all three DVCSs support interchange via the git "fast-import" changeset format. git does so natively, of course, and native support for Bazaar is under active development, and getting good early reviews as of mid-February 2009. Mercurial has idiosyncratic support for importing via its *hg convert* command, and third-party fast-import support is available for exporting. Also, the Tailor tool supports automatic maintenance of mirrors based on an official repository in any of the candidate formats with a local mirror in any format.

Usage Scenarios

Probably the best way to help decide on whether/which DVCS should replace Subversion is to see what it takes to perform some real-world usage scenarios that developers (core and non-core) have to work with. Each usage scenario outlines what it is, a bullet list of what the basic steps are (which can vary slightly per VCS), and how to perform the usage scenario in the various VCSs (including Subversion).

Each VCS had a single author in charge of writing implementations for each scenario (unless otherwise noted).

• svn: Brett
• bzr: Barry
• hg: Alexandre
• git: Stephen

Initial Setup

Some DVCSs have some perks if you do some initial setup upfront. This section covers what can be done before any of the usage scenarios are run in order to take better advantage of the tools.

All of the DVCSs support configuring your project identification. Unlike the centralized systems, they use your email address to identify your commits. (Access control is generally done by mechanisms external to the DVCS, such as ssh or console login). This identity may be associated with a full name.

All of the DVCSs will query the system to get some approximation to this information, but that may not be what you want. They also support setting this information on a per-user basis, and on a per- project basis. Convenience commands to set these attributes vary, but all allow direct editing of configuration files.

Some VCSs support end-of-line (EOL) conversions on checkout/checkin.

svn

None required, but it is recommended you follow the guidelines <http://www.python.org/dev/faq/#what-configuration-settings-should-i-use>_ in the dev FAQ.

bzr

No setup is required, but for much quicker and space-efficient local branching, you should create a shared repository to hold all your Python branches. A shared repository is really just a parent directory containing a .bzr directory. When bzr commits a revision, it searches from the local directory on up the file system for a .bzr directory to hold the revision. By sharing revisions across multiple branches, you cut down on the amount of disk space used. Do this:

  cd ~/projects
  bzr init-repo python
  cd python

Now, all your Python branches should be created inside of ~/projects/python.

There are also some settings you can put in your ~/.bzr/bazaar.conf and ~/.bzr/locations.conf file to set up defaults for interacting with Python code. None of them are required, although some are recommended. E.g. I would suggest gpg signing all commits, but that might be too high a barrier for developers. Also, you can set up default push locations depending on where you want to push branches by default. If you have write access to the master branches, that push location could be code.python.org. Otherwise, it might be a free Bazaar code hosting service such as Launchpad. If Bazaar is chosen, we should decide what the policies and recommendations are.

At a minimum, I would set up your email address:

  bzr whoami "Firstname Lastname <email.address@example.com>"

As with hg and git below, there are ways to set your email address (or really, just about any parameter) on a per-repository basis. You do this with settings in your $HOME/.bazaar/locations.conf file, which has an ini-style format as does the other DVCSs. See the Bazaar documentation for details, which mostly aren't relevant for this discussion.

hg

Minimally, you should set your user name. To do so, create the file .hgrc in your home directory and add the following:

  [ui]
  username = Firstname Lastname <email.address@example.com>

If you are using Windows and your tools do not support Unix-style newlines, you can enable automatic newline translation by adding to your configuration:

  [extensions]
  win32text =

These options can also be set locally to a given repository by customizing <repo>/.hg/hgrc, instead of ~/.hgrc.

git

None needed. However, git supports a number of features that can smooth your work, with a little preparation. git supports setting defaults at the workspace, user, and system levels. The system level is out of scope of this PEP. The user configuration file is $HOME/.gitconfig on Unix-like systems, and the workspace configuration file is $REPOSITORY/.git/config.

You can use the git-config tool to set preferences for user.name and user.email either globally (for your system login account) or locally (to a given git working copy), or you can edit the configuration files (which have the same format as shown in the Mercurial section above).

  # my full name doesn't change
  # note "--global" flag means per user
  # (system-wide configuration is set with "--system")
  git config --global user.name 'Firstname Lastname'
  # but use my Pythonic email address
  cd /path/to/python/repository
  git config user.email email.address@python.example.com

If you are using Windows, you probably want to set the core.autocrlf and core.safecrlf preferences to true using git-config.

  # check out files with CRLF line endings rather than Unix-style LF only
  git config --global core.autocrlf true
  # scream if a transformation would be ambiguous
  # (eg, a working file contains both naked LF and CRLF)
  # and check them back in with the reverse transformation
  git config --global core.safecrlf true

Although the repository will usually contain a .gitignore file specifying file names that rarely if ever should be registered in the VCS, you may have personal conventions (e.g., always editing log messages in a temporary file named ".msg") that you may wish to specify.

  # tell git where my personal ignores are
  git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore
  # I use .msg for my long commit logs, and Emacs makes backups in
  # files ending with ~
  # these are globs, not regular expressions
  echo '*~' >> ~/.gitignore
  echo '.msg' >> ~/.gitignore

If you use multiple branches, as with the other VCSes, you can save a lot of space by putting all objects in a common object store. This also can save download time, if the origins of the branches were in different repositories, because objects are shared across branches in your repository even if they were not present in the upstream repositories. git is very space- and time-efficient and applies a number of optimizations automatically, so this configuration is optional. (Examples are omitted.)

One-Off Checkout

As a non-core developer, I want to create and publish a one-off patch that fixes a bug, so that a core developer can review it for inclusion in the mainline.

• Checkout/branch/clone trunk.
• Edit some code.
• Generate a patch (based on what is best supported by the VCS, e.g. branch history).
• Receive reviewer comments and address the issues.
• Generate a second patch for the core developer to commit.

svn

  svn checkout http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk
  cd trunk
  # Edit some code.
  echo "The cake is a lie!" > README
  # Since svn lacks support for local commits, we fake it with patches.
  svn diff >> commit-1.diff
  svn diff >> patch-1.diff
  # Upload the patch-1 to bugs.python.org.
  # Receive reviewer comments.
  # Edit some code.
  echo "The cake is real!" > README
  # Since svn lacks support for local commits, we fake it with patches.
  svn diff >> commit-2.diff
  svn diff >> patch-2.diff
  # Upload patch-2 to bugs.python.org

bzr

  bzr branch http://code.python.org/python/trunk
  cd trunk
  # Edit some code.
  bzr commit -m 'Stuff I did'
  bzr send -o bundle
  # Upload bundle to bugs.python.org
  # Receive reviewer comments
  # Edit some code
  bzr commit -m 'Respond to reviewer comments'
  bzr send -o bundle
  # Upload updated bundle to bugs.python.org

The bundle file is like a super-patch. It can be read by patch(1) but it contains additional metadata so that it can be fed to bzr merge to produce a fully usable branch completely with history. See Patch Review_ section below.

hg

  hg clone http://code.python.org/hg/trunk
  cd trunk
  # Edit some code.
  hg commit -m "Stuff I did"
  hg outgoing -p > fixes.patch
  # Upload patch to bugs.python.org
  # Receive reviewer comments
  # Edit some code
  hg commit -m "Address reviewer comments."
  hg outgoing -p > additional-fixes.patch
  # Upload patch to bugs.python.org

While hg outgoing does not have the flag for it, most Mercurial commands support git's extended patch format through a --git command. This can be set in one's .hgrc file so that all commands that generate a patch use the extended format.

git

The patches could be created with git diff master > stuff-i-did.patch, too, but git format-patch | git am knows some tricks (empty files, renames, etc) that ordinary patch can't handle. git grabs "Stuff I did" out of the the commit message to create the file name 0001-Stuff-I-did.patch. See Patch Review below for a description of the git-format-patch format.

  # Get the mainline code.
  git clone git://code.python.org/python/trunk
  cd trunk
  # Edit some code.
  git commit -a -m 'Stuff I did.'
  # Create patch for my changes (i.e, relative to master).
  git format-patch master
  git tag stuff-v1
  # Upload 0001-Stuff-I-did.patch to bugs.python.org.
  # Time passes ... receive reviewer comments.
  # Edit more code.
  git commit -a -m 'Address reviewer comments.'
  # Make an add-on patch to apply on top of the original.
  git format-patch stuff-v1
  # Upload 0001-Address-reviewer-comments.patch to bugs.python.org.

Backing Out Changes

As a core developer, I want to undo a change that was not ready for inclusion in the mainline.

• Back out the unwanted change.
• Push patch to server.

svn

  # Assume the change to revert is in revision 40
  svn merge -c -40 .
  # Resolve conflicts, if any.
  svn commit -m "Reverted revision 40"

bzr

  # Assume the change to revert is in revision 40
  bzr merge -r 40..39
  # Resolve conflicts, if any.
  bzr commit -m "Reverted revision 40"

Note that if the change you want revert is the last one that was made, you can just use bzr uncommit.

hg

  # Assume the change to revert is in revision 9150dd9c6d30
  hg backout --merge -r 9150dd9c6d30
  # Resolve conflicts, if any.
  hg commit -m "Reverted changeset 9150dd9c6d30"
  hg push

Note, you can use "hg rollback" and "hg strip" to revert changes you committed in your local repository, but did not yet push to other repositories.

git

  # Assume the change to revert is the grandfather of a revision tagged "newhotness".
  git revert newhotness~2
  # Resolve conflicts if any.  If there are no conflicts, the commit
  # will be done automatically by "git revert", which prompts for a log.
  git commit -m "Reverted changeset 9150dd9c6d30."
  git push

Patch Review

As a core developer, I want to review patches submitted by other people, so that I can make sure that only approved changes are added to Python.

Core developers have to review patches as submitted by other people. This requires applying the patch, testing it, and then tossing away the changes. The assumption can be made that a core developer already has a checkout/branch/clone of the trunk.

• Branch off of trunk.
• Apply patch w/o any comments as generated by the patch submitter.
• Push patch to server.
• Delete now-useless branch.

svn

Subversion does not exactly fit into this development style very well as there are no such thing as a "branch" as has been defined in this PEP. Instead a developer either needs to create another checkout for testing a patch or create a branch on the server. Up to this point, core developers have not taken the "branch on the server" approach to dealing with individual patches. For this scenario the assumption will be the developer creates a local checkout of the trunk to work with.

    cp -r trunk issue0000
    cd issue0000
    patch -p0 < __patch__
    # Review patch.
    svn commit -m "Some patch."
    cd ..
    rm -r issue0000

Another option is to only have a single checkout running at any one time and use svn diff along with svn revert -R to store away independent changes you may have made.

bzr

    bzr branch trunk issueNNNN
    # Download `patch` bundle from Roundup
    bzr merge patch
    # Review patch
    bzr commit -m'Patch NNN by So N. So' --fixes python:NNNN
    bzr push bzr+ssh://me@code.python.org/trunk
    rm -rf ../issueNNNN

Alternatively, since you're probably going to commit these changes to the trunk, you could just do a checkout. That would give you a local working tree while the branch (i.e. all revisions) would continue to live on the server. This is similar to the svn model and might allow you to more quickly review the patch. There's no need for the push in this case.

    bzr checkout trunk issueNNNN
    # Download `patch` bundle from Roundup
    bzr merge patch
    # Review patch
    bzr commit -m'Patch NNNN by So N. So' --fixes python:NNNN
    rm -rf ../issueNNNN

hg

    hg clone trunk issue0000
    cd issue0000
    # If the patch was generated using hg export, the user name of the
    # submitter is automatically recorded. Otherwise,
    # use hg import --no-commit submitted.diff and commit with
    # hg commit -u "Firstname Lastname <email.address@example.com>"
    hg import submitted.diff
    # Review patch.
    hg push ssh://alexandre@code.python.org/hg/trunk/

git

We assume a patch created by git-format-patch. This is a Unix mbox file containing one or more patches, each formatted as an RFC 2822 message. git-am interprets each message as a commit as follows. The author of the patch is taken from the From: header, the date from the Date header. The commit log is created by concatenating the content of the subject line, a blank line, and the message body up to the start of the patch.::

    cd trunk
    # Create a branch in case we don't like the patch.
    # This checkout takes zero time, since the workspace is left in
    # the same state as the master branch.
    git checkout -b patch-review
    # Download patch from bugs.python.org to submitted.patch.
    git am < submitted.patch
    # Review and approve patch.
    # Merge into master and push.
    git checkout master
    git merge patch-review
    git push

Backport

As a core developer, I want to apply a patch to 2.6, 2.7, 3.0, and 3.1 so that I can fix a problem in all three versions.

Thanks to always having the cutting-edge and the latest release version under development, Python currently has four branches being worked on simultaneously. That makes it important for a change to propagate easily through various branches.

svn

Because of Python's use of svnmerge, changes start with the trunk (2.7) and then get merged to the release version of 2.6. To get the change into the 3.x series, the change is merged into 3.1, fixed up, and then merged into 3.0 (2.7 -> 2.6; 2.7 -> 3.1 -> 3.0).

This is in contrast to a port-forward strategy where the patch would have been added to 2.6 and then pulled forward into newer versions (2.6 -> 2.7 -> 3.0 -> 3.1).

    # Assume patch applied to 2.7 in revision 0000.
    cd release26-maint
    svnmerge merge -r 0000
    # Resolve merge conflicts and make sure patch works.
    svn commit -F svnmerge-commit-message.txt  # revision 0001.
    cd ../py3k
    svnmerge merge -r 0000
    # Same as for 2.6, except Misc/NEWS changes are reverted.
    svn revert Misc/NEWS
    svn commit -F svnmerge-commit-message.txt  # revision 0002.
    cd ../release30-maint
    svnmerge merge -r 0002
    svn commit -F svnmerge-commit-message.txt  # revision 0003.

bzr

Bazaar is pretty straightforward here, since it supports cherry picking revisions manually. In the example below, we could have given a revision id instead of a revision number, but that's usually not necessary. Martin Pool suggests "We'd generally recommend doing the fix first in the oldest supported branch, and then merging it forward to the later releases."::

    # Assume patch applied to 2.7 in revision 0000
    cd release26-maint
    bzr merge ../trunk -c 0000
    # Resolve conflicts and make sure patch works
    bzr commit -m 'Back port patch NNNN'
    bzr push bzr+ssh://me@code.python.org/trunk
    cd ../py3k
    bzr merge ../trunk -r 0000
    # Same as for 2.6 except Misc/NEWS changes are reverted
    bzr revert Misc/NEWS
    bzr commit -m 'Forward port patch NNNN'
    bzr push bzr+ssh://me@code.python.org/py3k

hg

Mercurial, like other DVCS, does not well support the current workflow used by Python core developers to backport patches. Right now, bug fixes are first applied to the development mainline (i.e., trunk), then back-ported to the maintenance branches and forward-ported, as necessary, to the py3k branch. This workflow requires the ability to cherry-pick individual changes. Mercurial's transplant extension provides this ability. Here is an example of the scenario using this workflow::

    cd release26-maint
    # Assume patch applied to 2.7 in revision 0000
    hg transplant -s ../trunk 0000
    # Resolve conflicts, if any.
    cd ../py3k
    hg pull ../trunk
    hg merge
    hg revert Misc/NEWS
    hg commit -m "Merged trunk"
    hg push

In the above example, transplant acts much like the current svnmerge command. When transplant is invoked without the revision, the command launches an interactive loop useful for transplanting multiple changes. Another useful feature is the --filter option which can be used to modify changesets programmatically (e.g., it could be used for removing changes to Misc/NEWS automatically).

Alternatively to the traditional workflow, we could avoid transplanting changesets by committing bug fixes to the oldest supported release, then merge these fixes upward to the more recent branches.

    cd release25-maint
    hg import fix_some_bug.diff
    # Review patch and run test suite. Revert if failure.
    hg push
    cd ../release26-maint
    hg pull ../release25-maint
    hg merge
    # Resolve conflicts, if any. Then, review patch and run test suite.
    hg commit -m "Merged patches from release25-maint."
    hg push
    cd ../trunk
    hg pull ../release26-maint
    hg merge
    # Resolve conflicts, if any, then review.
    hg commit -m "Merged patches from release26-maint."
    hg push

Although this approach makes the history non-linear and slightly more difficult to follow, it encourages fixing bugs across all supported releases. Furthermore, it scales better when there is many changes to backport, because we do not need to seek the specific revision IDs to merge.

git

In git I would have a workspace which contains all of the relevant master repository branches. git cherry-pick doesn't work across repositories; you need to have the branches in the same repository.

    # Assume patch applied to 2.7 in revision release27~3 (4th patch back from tip).
    cd integration
    git checkout release26
    git cherry-pick release27~3
    # If there are conflicts, resolve them, and commit those changes.
    # git commit -a -m "Resolve conflicts."
    # Run test suite. If fixes are necessary, record as a separate commit.
    # git commit -a -m "Fix code causing test failures."
    git checkout master
    git cherry-pick release27~3
    # Do any conflict resolution and test failure fixups.
    # Revert Misc/NEWS changes.
    git checkout HEAD^ -- Misc/NEWS
    git commit -m 'Revert cherry-picked Misc/NEWS changes.' Misc/NEWS
    # Push both ports.
    git push release26 master

If you are regularly merging (rather than cherry-picking) from a given branch, then you can block a given commit from being accidentally merged in the future by merging, then reverting it. This does not prevent a cherry-pick from pulling in the unwanted patch, and this technique requires blocking everything that you don't want merged. I'm not sure if this differs from svn on this point.

    cd trunk
    # Merge in the alpha tested code.
    git merge experimental-branch
    # We don't want the 3rd-to-last commit from the experimental-branch,
    # and we don't want it to ever be merged.
    # The notation "^N" means Nth parent of the current commit. Thus HEAD^2^1^1
    # means the first parent of the first parent of the second parent of HEAD.
    git revert HEAD^2^1^1
    # Propagate the merge and the prohibition to the public repository.
    git push

Coordinated Development of a New Feature

Sometimes core developers end up working on a major feature with several developers. As a core developer, I want to be able to publish feature branches to a common public location so that I can collaborate with other developers.

This requires creating a branch on a server that other developers can access. All of the DVCSs support creating new repositories on hosts where the developer is already able to commit, with appropriate configuration of the repository host. This is similar in concept to the existing sandbox in svn, although details of repository initialization may differ.

For non-core developers, there are various more-or-less public-access repository-hosting services. Bazaar has Launchpad, Mercurial has bitbucket.org, and git has GitHub. All also have easy-to-use CGI interfaces for developers who maintain their own servers.

• Branch trunk.
• Pull from branch on the server.
• Pull from trunk.
• Push merge to trunk.

svn

    # Create branch.
    svn copy svn+ssh://pythondev@svn.python.org/python/trunk svn+ssh://pythondev@svn.python.org/python/branches/NewHotness
    svn checkout svn+ssh://pythondev@svn.python.org/python/branches/NewHotness
    cd NewHotness
    svnmerge init
    svn commit -m "Initialize svnmerge."
    # Pull in changes from other developers.
    svn update
    # Pull in trunk and merge to the branch.
    svnmerge merge
    svn commit -F svnmerge-commit-message.txt

bzr

    XXX To be done by Brett as a test of knowledge and online documentation/community.

hg

    XXX To be done by Brett as a test of knowledge and online documentation/community.

git

    XXX To be done by Brett as a test of knowledge and online documentation/community.

Separation of Issue Dependencies

Sometimes, while working on an issue, it becomes apparent that the problem being worked on is actually a compound issue of various smaller issues. Being able to take the current work and then begin working on a separate issue is very helpful to separate out issues into individual units of work instead of compounding them into a single, large unit.

• Create a branch A (e.g. urllib has a bug).
• Edit some code.
• Create a new branch B that branch A depends on (e.g. the urllib bug exposes a socket bug).
• Edit some code in branch B.
• Commit branch B.
• Edit some code in branch A.
• Commit branch A.
• Clean up.

svn

To make up for svn's lack of cheap branching, it has a changelist option to associate a file with a single changelist. This is not as powerful as being able to associate at the commit level. There is also no way to express dependencies between changelists.

    cp -r trunk issue0000
    cd issue0000
    # Edit some code.
    echo "The cake is a lie!" > README
    svn changelist A README
    # Edit some other code.
    echo "I own Python!" . LICENSE
    svn changelist B LICENSE
    svn ci -m "Tell it how it is." --changelist B
    # Edit changelist A some more.
    svn ci -m "Speak the truth." --changelist A
    cd ..
    rm -rf issue0000

bzr

Here's an approach that uses bzr shelf (now a standard part of bzr) to squirrel away some changes temporarily while you take a detour to fix the socket bugs.

    bzr branch trunk bug-0000
    cd bug-0000
    # Edit some code. Dang, we need to fix the socket module.
    bzr shelve --all
    # Edit some code.
    bzr commit -m "Socket module fixes"
    # Detour over, now resume fixing urllib
    bzr unshelve
    # Edit some code

Another approach uses the loom plugin. Looms can greatly simplify working on dependent branches because they automatically take care of the stacking dependencies for you. Imagine looms as a stack of dependent branches (called "threads" in loom parlance), with easy ways to move up and down the stack of threads, merge changes up the stack to descendant threads, create diffs between threads, etc. Occasionally, you may need or want to export your loom threads into separate branches, either for review or commit. Higher threads incorporate all the changes in the lower threads, automatically.

    bzr branch trunk bug-0000
    cd bug-0000
    bzr loomify --base trunk
    bzr create-thread fix-urllib
    # Edit some code. Dang, we need to fix the socket module first.
    bzr commit -m "Checkpointing my work so far"
    bzr down-thread
    bzr create-thread fix-socket
    # Edit some code
    bzr commit -m "Socket module fixes"
    bzr up-thread
    # Manually resolve conflicts if necessary
    bzr commit -m 'Merge in socket fixes'
    # Edit me some more code
    bzr commit -m "Now that socket is fixed, complete the urllib fixes"
    bzr record done

For bonus points, let's say someone else fixes the socket module in exactly the same way you just did. Perhaps this person even grabbed your fix-socket thread and applied just that to the trunk. You'd like to be able to merge their changes into your loom and delete your now-redundant fix-socket thread.

    bzr down-thread trunk
    # Get all new revisions to the trunk. If you've done things
    # correctly, this will succeed without conflict.
    bzr pull
    bzr up-thread
    # See? The fix-socket thread is now identical to the trunk
    bzr commit -m 'Merge in trunk changes'
    bzr diff -r thread: | wc -l # returns 0
    bzr combine-thread
    bzr up-thread
    # Resolve any conflicts
    bzr commit -m 'Merge trunk'
    # Now our top-thread has an up-to-date trunk and just the urllib fix.

hg

One approach is to use the shelve extension; this extension is not included with Mercurial, but it is easy to install. With shelve, you can select changes to put temporarily aside.

    hg clone trunk issue0000
    cd issue0000
    # Edit some code (e.g. urllib).
    hg shelve
    # Select changes to put aside
    # Edit some other code (e.g. socket).
    hg commit
    hg unshelve
    # Complete initial fix.
    hg commit
    cd ../trunk
    hg pull ../issue0000
    hg merge
    hg commit
    rm -rf ../issue0000

Several other way to approach this scenario with Mercurial. Alexander Solovyov presented a few alternative approaches on Mercurial's mailing list.

git

    cd trunk
    # Edit some code in urllib.
    # Discover a bug in socket, want to fix that first.
    # So save away our current work.
    git stash
    # Edit some code, commit some changes.
    git commit -a -m "Completed fix of socket."
    # Restore the in-progress work on urllib.
    git stash apply
    # Edit me some more code, commit some more fixes.
    git commit -a -m "Complete urllib fixes."
    # And push both patches to the public repository.
    git push

Bonus points: suppose you took your time, and someone else fixes socket in the same way you just did, and landed that in the trunk. In that case, your push will fail because your branch is not up-to-date. If the fix was a one-liner, there's a very good chance that it's *exactly* the same, character for character. git would notice that, and you are done; git will silently merge them.

Suppose we're not so lucky:

    # Update your branch.
    git pull git://code.python.org/public/trunk master

    # git has fetched all the necessary data, but reports that the
    # merge failed.  We discover the nearly-duplicated patch.
    # Neither our version of the master branch nor the workspace has
    # been touched.  Revert our socket patch and pull again:
    git revert HEAD^
    git pull git://code.python.org/public/trunk master

Like Bazaar and Mercurial, git has extensions to manage stacks of patches. You can use the original Quilt by Andrew Morton, or there is StGit ("stacked git") which integrates patch-tracking for large sets of patches into the VCS in a way similar to Mercurial Queues or Bazaar looms.

Doing a Python Release

How does PEP 101 change when using a DVCS?

bzr

It will change, but not substantially so. When doing the maintenance branch, we'll just push to the new location instead of doing an svn cp. Tags are totally different, since in svn they are directory copies, but in bzr (and I'm guessing hg), they are just symbolic names for revisions on a particular branch. The release.py script will have to change to use bzr commands instead. It's possible that because DVCS (in particular, bzr) does cherry picking and merging well enough that we'll be able to create the maint branches sooner. It would be a useful exercise to try to do a release off the bzr/hg mirrors.

hg

Clearly, details specific to Subversion in PEP 101 and in the release script will need to be updated. In particular, release tagging and maintenance branches creation process will have to be modified to use Mercurial's features; this will simplify and streamline certain aspects of the release process. For example, tagging and re-tagging a release will become a trivial operation since a tag, in Mercurial, is simply a symbolic name for a given revision.

git

It will change, but not substantially so. When doing the maintenance branch, we'll just git push to the new location instead of doing an svn cp. Tags are totally different, since in svn they are directory copies, but in git they are just symbolic names for revisions, as are branches. (The difference between a tag and a branch is that tags refer to a particular commit, and will never change unless you use git tag -f to force them to move. The checked-out branch, on the other hand, is automatically updated by git commit.) The release.py script will have to change to use git commands instead. With git I would create a (local) maintenance branch as soon as the release engineer is chosen. Then I'd "git pull" until I didn't like a patch, when it would be "git pull; git revert ugly-patch", until it started to look like the sensible thing is to fork off, and start doing "git cherry-pick" on the good patches.

Platform/Tool Support

Operating Systems

As the above table shows, all three DVCSs are available on all three major OS platforms. But what it also shows is that Bazaar is the only DVCS that directly supports Windows with a binary installer while Mercurial and git require you to rely on a third-party for binaries. Both bzr and hg have a tortoise version while git does not.

Bazaar and Mercurial also has the benefit of being available in pure Python with optional extensions available for performance.

CRLF -> LF Support

bzr

• My understanding is that support for this is being worked on as I type, landing in a version RSN. I will try to dig up details.

hg

• Supported via the win32text extension.

git

• I can't say from personal experience, but it looks like there's pretty good support via the core.autocrlf and core.safecrlf configuration attributes.

Case-insensitive filesystem support

bzr

• Should be OK. I share branches between Linux and OS X all the

  time. I've done case changes (e.g. bzr mv Mailman mailman) and as long as I did it on Linux (obviously), when I pulled in the changes on OS X everything was hunky dory.

hg

• Mercurial uses a case safe repository mechanism and detects case folding collisions.

git

• Since OS X preserves case, you can do case changes there too. git does not have a problem with renames in either direction. However, case-insensitive filesystem support is usually taken to mean complaining about collisions on case-sensitive files systems. git does not do that.

Tools

In terms of code review tools such as Review Board and Rietveld, the former supports all three while the latter supports hg and git but not bzr. Bazaar does not yet have an online review board, but it has several ways to manage email based reviews and trunk merging. There's Bundle Buggy, Patch Queue Manager (PQM), and Launchpad's code reviews.

All three have some web site online that provides basic hosting support for people who want to put a repository online. Bazaar has Launchpad, Mercurial has bitbucket.org, and git has GitHub. Google Code also has instructions on how to use git with the service, both to hold a repository and how to act as a read-only mirror.

All three also appear to be supported by Buildbot.

Usage On Top Of Subversion

All three DVCSs have svn support, although git is the only one to come with that support out-of-the-box.

Server Support

All three DVCSs support various hooks on the client and server side for e.g. pre/post-commit verifications.

Development

All three projects are under active development. Git seems to be on a monthly release schedule. Bazaar is on a time-released monthly schedule. Mercurial is on a 3-month, timed release schedule.

Special Features

bzr

Martin Pool adds: "bzr has a stable Python scripting interface, with a distinction between public and private interfaces and a deprecation window for APIs that are changing. Some plugins are listed in https://edge.launchpad.net/bazaar and http://bazaar-vcs.org/Documentation".

hg

Alexander Solovyov comments:

• Mercurial has easy to use extensive API with hooks for main events and ability to extend commands. Also there is the mq (mercurial queues) extension, distributed with Mercurial, which simplifies work with patches.

git

git has a cvsserver mode, ie, you can check out a tree from git using CVS. You can even commit to the tree, but features like merging are absent, and branches are handled as CVS modules, which is likely to shock a veteran CVS user.

Tests/Impressions

As I (Brett Cannon) am left with the task of of making the final decision of which/any DVCS to go with and not my co-authors, I felt it only fair to write down what tests I ran and my impressions as I evaluate the various tools so as to be as transparent as possible.

Barrier to Entry

The amount of time and effort it takes to get a checkout of Python's repository is critical. If the difficulty or time is too great then a person wishing to contribute to Python may very well give up. That cannot be allowed to happen.

I measured the checking out of the 2.x trunk as if I was a non-core developer. Timings were done using the time command in zsh and space was calculated with du -c -h.

When comparing these numbers to svn, it is important to realize that it is not a 1:1 comparison. Svn does not pull down the entire revision history like all of the DVCSs do. That means svn can perform an initial checkout much faster than the DVCS purely based on the fact that it has less information to download for the network.

Performance of basic information functionality

To see how the tools did for performing a command that required querying the history, the log for the README file was timed.

• bzr: 4.5s
• hg: 1.1s
• git: 1.5s

One thing of note during this test was that git took longer than the other three tools to figure out how to get the log without it using a pager. While the pager use is a nice touch in general, not having it automatically turn on took some time (turns out the main git command has a --no-pager flag to disable use of the pager).

Figuring out what command to use from built-in help

I ended up trying to find out what the command was to see what URL the repository was cloned from. To do this I used nothing more than the help provided by the tool itself or its man pages.

Bzr was the easiest: bzr info. Running bzr help didn't show what I wanted, but mentioned bzr help commands. That list had the command with a description that made sense.

Git was the second easiest. The command git help didn't show much and did not have a way of listing all commands. That is when I viewed the man page. Reading through the various commands I discovered git remote. The command itself spit out nothing more than origin. Trying git remote origin said it was an error and printed out the command usage. That is when I noticed git remote show. Running git remote show origin gave me the information I wanted.

For hg, I never found the information I wanted on my own. It turns out I wanted hg paths, but that was not obvious from the description of "show definition of symbolic path names" as printed by hg help (it should be noted that reporting this in the PEP did lead to the Mercurial developers to clarify the wording to make the use of the hg paths command clearer).

Updating a checkout

To see how long it takes to update an outdated repository I timed both updating a repository 700 commits behind and 50 commits behind (three weeks stale and 1 week stale, respectively).

Note:

• Git lacks a value for the *700 commits* scenario as it does not seem to allow checking out a repository at a specific revision.

Git deserves special mention for its output from git pull. It not only lists the delta change information for each file but also color-codes the information.

(To do: usage on top of svn, filling in 'Coordinated Development of a New Feature' scenario.)